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American Presidential China: The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893)President, 1877–81

Bearing elaborate depictions of American flora and fauna inspired by the work of contemporary French ceramists, the state service commissioned from Haviland and Company during the Hayes administration comprised 562 pieces for nine courses with 130 distinct decorations.1 The creator of the images, artist Theodore R. Davis, granted to Haviland the right to duplicate many pieces for exhibition and sale to the public. White House china in the initial shipments of June and December 1880 is distinguished (on the reverse, among numerous other marks) by a cipher of Davis’s initials with the date “1879.” Pieces made for sale to the public and those ordered during the Grover Cleveland administration in 1886 lack the cipher and have patent numbers printed in blue on the reverse. Susan Gray Detweiler, from American Presidential China: The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008), p. 60.

Notes:
1) Haviland and Company, The White House Porcelain Service: Designs by an American Artist, Illustrating Exclusively American Fauna and Flora. 1879 (New York, 1880). Reproduced in Klapthor, Official White House China, pp. 201–88. Theodore R. Davis, whose illustrations appeared regularly in Harper’s Weekly, was a well-known artist of the Civil War and the West.

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